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Listen to
Us
We’ve a Story to
Tell
Sach Kanwal
Singh
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Now
comes the ultimate shame as the world intelligentsia has minced no
words is saying that India is next only to Iraq when it comes to
social hostility and religious discrimination perpetrated by
individuals and groups. Clearly, India can forget any hope of
fooling the world of harboring a free and pluralistic society. The
latest Pew Research Center report should shame the Indian State that
is always in a denial mode even in the face of clinching evidence to
the contrary. |
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 That Indian
brahamanical establishment has been intolerant of Dalits,
minorities, ethnic groups is a fact known to us all. The Sikhs have
been crying hoarse, telling the world that New Delhi's policies are
aimed at blatant violation of human rights. Massacre of the Sikhs in
1984 and the complete lack of justice after that, the killings of
Muslims in Gujarat, the assaults on Christians, and the
marginalization of the people of the northeast have long convinced
the minorities that the social hostility in India has the blessings
of the government.
Now comes the
ultimate shame as the world intelligentsia has minced no words is
saying that India is next only to Iraq when it comes to social
hostility and religious discrimination perpetrated by individuals
and groups.
The verdict
comes from none other than the highly respected US think-tank,
Washington-based Pew Research Centre that has revealed the results
of a study carried out under its aegis.
 Clearly, India
can forget any hope of fooling the world of harboring a free and
pluralistic society.
The study titled
`Global Restrictions on Religion' took into account the situation in
as many as 198 countries, North Korea
being the only notable exception, to derive the conclusion.
India was just
below Iraq and well above countries like Saudi Arabia and
Afghanistan when it came to social hostility in the country. Pakistan
is at the third place right below India.
The study, which
claims to cover 99.5% of the world population, deals with
restrictions imposed on religion not just by social groups and
individuals but also by the government. Even in the case of
government induced restrictions, India fares badly with its position
in the top 40 countries out of the 198 mentioned.
Even though the
report says that "the highest overall levels of restrictions are
found in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran, where
both the government and society at large impose numerous limits on
religious beliefs and practices'' India is ranked well above them in
the social hostility index.
While India has
fared badly on both, China has done remarkably well when it comes to
social hostility even though it has done badly in the government
imposed restrictions section. "Vietnam and China, for instance, have
high government restrictions on religion but are in the moderate or
low range when it comes to social hostilities. Nigeria and
Bangladesh follow the opposite pattern: high in social hostilities
but moderate in terms of government actions,'' it says.
The report clubs
India with Sri Lanka, Ethiopia and Bangladesh as countries where
large segments of the population want to protect the special place
of one particular religion. This is how it explains the high social
hostility index for these countries. "Many of the restrictions
imposed in these countries are driven by groups pressing for the
enshrinement of their interpretation of the majority faith,
including through Shariah law in Muslim societies and Hindutva
movement in India which seeks to define India as a Hindu nation,''
says the report.
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We
beseech everyone, from the White House to the United Nations to the
justice-loving people in the world's democracies and those fighting
for democracy where it does not exist, to engage with the issue and
listen to the laments of the Sikhs. We are a brave race, proud of
our heritage, our religious motto of universal welfare, our
sacrifices for creating a better planet, and we are being persecuted
in India. We have faced genocidal killings merely because we are
tall poppies. We shall not be cowed down.
All we need is
your ear. Please listen to us. We have a story to tell.
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In preparing
this study, states the report, the Pew Forum devised a battery of
measures, phrased as questions, to gauge the levels of government
and social restrictions on religion in each country. "To answer
these questions, Pew Forum researchers combed through 16 widely
cited, publicly available sources of information, including reports
by the US State Department, the US Commission on International
Religious Freedom, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion
or Belief, the Council of the European Union, the United Kingdom's
Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Human Rights Watch, the
International Crisis Group, the Hudson Institute and Amnesty
International,'' it states.
While the Sikh
community has widely welcomed the study as it will help bring the
focus on the way India has been dealing with its minorities, there
is little sign that even such a shocking study can convince Punjab's
ruling Badal family, claiming to be representing the Sikhs, to end
its alliance with a communal, rightwing, hate-agenda driven RSS-BJP.
That India's
record is poor, very poor, was earlier underlined by UN High
Commissioner for Human Rights, Ms. Navanethem Pillay who, unlike
most of her predecessors, minced no words in calling a spade a
spade. Last in India
for a lecture at a convention organized by India’s
National Human Rights Commission on 23 March, 2009
in Delhi,
she pointed out glaring loopholes in India’s
record of Human Rights implementation and urged India to be more
forthcoming than merely paying lip service to protecting human
rights.
The latest Pew
Research Center report should shame the Indian State that is always
in a denial mode even in the face of clinching evidence to the
contrary.
India's
discrimination against the weak and the deprived goes much beyond
mere poverty and the unrelenting bite of prejudice and brutality.
The fact remains that such deep-rooted poverty is also by design and
there is but no desire to leap out of the crippling disadvantage of
dependence and successfully pursued our dream of self-reliance.
 Any corrective
step in this direction to achieve a formidable, empowering change
will transform geopolitics, the landscape of social relations, and
our very lives but it will change one more thing. It will dilute the
brahamanical powers' hold over polity and resources. Naturally, they
will have little interest in the power of dreams to reinvent reality
and make the world a more just and hospitable place for all.
Lip service,
however, is not lacking. Indian judiciary has been delivering
judgments which gullible human rights activists have been welcoming,
but which make little difference on the ground. One of the biggest
and the most cruel joke on India's poor are a series of so-called
"groundbreaking judgments" in which the Supreme Court of India has
interpreted the right to life to include nutrition, clothing and
shelter. In another case concerning the issues of inadequate drought
relief and chronic hunger and under-nutrition, the Supreme Court has
directed the government to implement food relief programs to halt
starvation, supply schools with mid-day meals, and provide
subsidized grain to millions of destitute households.
Such judgments
only give the Indian establishment a handle to wave at international
forums to cry hoarse as to what a wonderful country it has become as
far as protection of human rights was concerned. The fact remains
that nothing changes on the ground. Forget about ensuring right to
food or right to education to the most deprived, farmers in many
Indian states, including Punjab,
have been committing suicide on such a regular basis that it has
stopped making it to news pages.
Hostility
towards Muslims is enshrined in the political agenda of the major
Opposition party, and the ruling party has no qualms about not
pursuing the path of justice even when thousands of Sikhs were burnt
alive on the roads of its national capital.
One court in
India actually gave a judgement in the "Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan
case" in which the five aggressors of a rape victim were acquitted
because the judges did not find it credible that upper caste men
would sexually abuse a lower caste woman. The woman had to appeal to
the Supreme Court.
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Only in
a country in which the rulers know that social hostility pays rich
dividends do they dare to give tickets to Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan
Kumar, the killer of the Sikhs. Only in a country where the right
wing knows that killings Muslims at a large scale pays electoral
dividends can a Narendra Modi make Maya Kodnani a minister. Only
when the rich, the elite and the powerful are clear that social
hostility is good for business and profiteering do they hail
Narendra Modi as an icon of development. |
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Strangely, the
fruits of economic liberalization and rapid economic growth have
only help strengthened the ways in which discriminatory treatment is
meted out as benefits and dividends are shared unequally. Poverty is
still a grinding reality for millions of people in India
but more than that deep, widespread and longstanding asymmetries in
power, participation and wealth are exacerbated by the global
economic crisis.
There is no
consistent government commitment to formulate national laws and
policies that promote and protect human rights and seek to support
the most vulnerable. Even the working of the NHRC is suspect.
Dalits, as well
as tribal peoples, continue to live in abject poverty. Policies and
measures that have been established to ensure relief for these
groups, their access to justice, and accountability for perpetrators
of abuses against them, have neither sufficiently alleviated their
conditions, nor have they satisfactorily curtailed the climate of
impunity that enables human rights violations.
Social hostility
in India has only increased after the horrific terrorist attack in
Mumbai since it has given a handle to communal forces in India
to polarize society and stoke suspicions against the Muslim
community. There has been little effort from the establishment to
counter violent religious extremism of any kind by insisting on
peaceful coexistence, tolerance and acceptance of diversity.
Everyone,
including the then US President Bill Clinton and his Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright is well aware of the way Indian
intelligence agencies killed Sikhs in Chattisingpora in Kashmir, but
is more important is the utter lack of any noise from the political
establishment on the issue. What prevented the BJP from taking up
the issue, and what, in God's name, stopped the communists from
demanding an international probe?
 In the past two
decades, hundreds of cases of disappearances have been reported in
Kashmir. These cases must be properly investigated in order to bring
a sense of closure to the families who for far too long have been
awaiting news—any news.
India hardly
needed to wait for the Pew Research Center's report to shame itself.
Its own landmark report by the Sachar Committee on the
socio-economic status of the Muslim minority was enough to shame
itself. The Nanawati Commission report on 1984 massacre of Sikhs
fell way short of what any right thinking human being would have
expected, but even in the form that it was in failed to shame India.
With what face did the Congress make Jagdish Tytler the Union
Minister? And even more importantly, with what face did the rest of
the Indian political establishment live with the fact?
Only in a
country in which the rulers know that social hostility pays rich
dividends do they dare to give tickets to Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan
Kumar, the killer of the Sikhs. Only in a country where the right
wing knows that killings Muslims at a large scale pays electoral
dividends can a Narendra Modi make Maya Kodnani a minister. Only
when the rich, the elite and the powerful are clear that social
hostility is good for business and profiteering do they hail
Narendra Modi as an icon of development.
It is this that
should be enough to tell the world that social hostility in India is
not something that the regime or the political class as a whole
should be fighting. In fact, it is they who have nurtured this
social hostility, made it profitable, and they have every incentive
to further stoke it. We, the Sikhs, are grateful to the Pew Research
Center for taking up this study and revealing the results, and hope
it will tell the world teh real picture of India. But we are not
shocked by the result. The Sikhs have been a target of hatred and
marginalization agenda.
.jpg) Just combine
this social hostility with the denial of space, legitimate political
space, to women, and you have the recipe of a state that scores
shamefully on any index of human development. Add to it the poverty
figures, the malnutrition data, the female foeticide, the literacy
data and the unemployment, the caste discrimination and the current
onslaught against the tribals and the ethnic groups and you have a
country that spells its name as S-H-A-M-E. You can call it India.
New Delhi's real
image was truly exposed at the last Durban Review Conference on
racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance in Geneva.
So far we have not seen any attempt to make an assessment of
implementation of the Durban Declaration and Program of Action to
combat racism and intolerance (DDPA) which States adopted by
consensus in 2001.
Let there be no
doubt that India is least interested in attaining the goal of
attaining discrimination-free societies that must override
differences and reconcile diverse perspectives. Instead it uses its
leverage as an economic power to ensure that the status quo remains.
It was most clear at Copenhagen. It is time that the minorities
should speak out jointly, multiply forces with the other
marginalized, lowered castes and tribals, and the persecuted ethnic
groups in Kashmir and north east and saner elements in Indian civil
society.
Pew Research
Center's report is a good milestone to help discuss how we can
converge our energies and resources to support freedom and rights
wherever they are at stake, and particularly regarding the alarming
situations in India.
We, the Sikhs,
also call upon the international community to pay heed to the
findings of such a respected think tank. The motley group of Sikhs
that stood with candles near the Fremont Sahib gurdwara to mark the
International Human Rights Day on December 10, just days before the Pew Center's
report came out, was saying the same thing: please see India for
what it is. The years to come are crucial for sowing the seeds of an
improved international partnership as the world becomes a global
village. The bullies in that village must be dealt with strongly.
We beseech
everyone from the White House to the United Nations to the
justice-loving people in the world's democracies and those fighting
for democracy where it does not exist to engage with the issue and
listen to the laments of the Sikhs. We are a brave race, proud of
our heritage, our religious motto of universal welfare, our
sacrifices for creating a better planet, and we are being persecuted
in India. We have faced genocidal killings merely because we are
tall poppies.
We need the
world to pay attention to the Sikh story. The Sikh experience is
still in need of a meta-narrative. This Pew Research
Center report is a good cue for the world to tune in and listen to
the ugly noises of minority repression emerging from India. We have
a voice. We shall speak. We shall not be silenced. We shall not be
cowed down.
All we need is
your ear. Please listen to us. We have a story to tell.
23
December 2009
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